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Barence writes "The most common complaint about 3D is that the glasses give you a headache, but that's not actually true, according to the man who teaches the pros how to make better 3D. Speaking at the BBC in London, Buzz Hays, chief instructor for the Sony 3D Technology Center in Culver City, California, explained: 'It's not the technology's fault, it's really the content that can cause these problems. It's easy to make 3D but it's hard to make it good — and by "good" I mean taking care to make sure that this isn't going to cause eyestrain.' He went on to detail some of the mistakes made by inexperienced 3D film makers, from poor composition of shots, through uncomfortable convergence settings, to overuse of on-set monitors without viewing their content on a big screen. But the biggest admission Buzz made was that not even the 'experts' know all the tricks yet, which is why 3D should only get better from here. In the same seminar, Buzz also explained why 3D glasses are here to stay — at least for the next few years."

They were telling you the truth. There's no way the glasses cost $3 in the quantities they buy them in. What you're paying for with the additional $3 is the, extremely expensive, new projector equipment in the theater along with the premium experience that 3D is supposed to be.

Well, that and the simple law of economics: something is worth what people will pay. People will pay more to see the 3d version, and so they charge more. Simple as that. If you don't want to pay the premium, then go to the 3d showing. Most theaters have 2d versions.

It depends on the glasses. Simply circular-polarised glasses are dirt cheap. The funky multi-layer-dichroic filters used in Dolby-3D (it's like anaglyph, but with 6 specific wavelengths, 3 per eye. Think RlRrGlGrBlBr) are hella expensive. $50 per pair is what I've seen quoted and mentioned by the engineers. I guess the feel that the money saved on not needing a retro-reflective silver screen is better spent on the initial glasses cost and cleaning them between performances.
BTW, is the 'pay for your glasse

That seems a little unlikely, considering that all the modern 3-D systems require digital projection. You can certainly have picture quality issues with a digital projector, but that's usually due to operator error, rather than old equipment.

Why do I hate 3D glasses? Because I'm near sighted and had to wear glasses every day of my life... now watching movies or television is going to require a SECOND pair on top of the first one? Go to hell, hollywood, for making my everyday life even more impractical than it already is.

Similar complaint here: I can only see with one eye. Thus to me, 3D movies only cost more, have a lower contrast and really blurry without special glasses. Of course, I'll still end up watching more of them than I wish because my wife loves the gimmick.

I too have worn glasses since childhood. I've never had a problem wearing the 3d glasses over my normal ones, and I purchase my frames from the "big" sized rack at the eye doctor's shop. Don't you think that, maybe, you're just being a little bit of a drama queen?

Come to think of it, if you use big framed glasses do they have a separate nosepiece? Mine are small, thin glasses, but the nosepiece adds extra space to them. It's not the glasses pressing into my face, it's the nosepiece on my nose.

If I ever go to another 3D showing, I'm tempted to take the lenses from the 3D glasses and attempt to make them into a clip-on. That'd solve the annoyance

I too have worn glasses since childhood. I've never had a problem wearing the 3d glasses over my normal ones, and I purchase my frames from the "big" sized rack at the eye doctor's shop. Don't you think that, maybe, you're just being a little bit of a drama queen?

Let's see. There are three general descriptions of eye defects, shortsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism. They can be present in varying degrees. Astigmatism and short (or near) sightedness can be mixed in the same eye. Astigmatism involves an axis which will vary from person to person. There are literally tens of thousands of frames, each with their own dimensions. The standardized parts of the dimensions only extend to critical areas like the nose width and frame arm length.

My wife has some sort of condition that seems to be fixed with "prism correction" in her lenses, so there are other factors involved than just the basic three. I think that has to do with eye coordination and tracking or something.

Getting a prescription for contacts or eye surgery seems like a ridiculous hoop to jump through just to get a marginally improved picture of "Step up."

He's undoubtedly heard of contact lenses before, that he still wears glasses suggests that he prefers them for some reason or another, and I don't see why he should change. Hollywood and theaters are the ones pushing this in the hopes that they can wring more money out of us.

If contacts only marginally improves his vision, he doesn't even need glasses.

I meant that 3d is only a marginal improvement. It's just a not-so-cheap gimmick. A 3D movie is at best slightly better than a 2D version of it.

There are no advantages of glasses over contacts whatever

Dry eyes, sensitive eyes, fears about touching one's eyes, cosmetic value (to some people), personal preference, cheaper, less time in the morning and evening, headaches, and aamcf's point, just to name a few.

Get contact lenses. They're cheaper than glasses and you might even get laid.

Bullshit. My wife and I have both worn corrective lenses since childhood, and have very similar vision problems. We just did the math a couple of weeks ago. Over 3 years usage*, my very expensive "designer" glasses from a boutique shop are less than her average-priced daily contacts** from a low-cost source. And that's not counting the fact that eye exams for contact lenses are significantly more expensive. In fact, my wife is considering laser surgery because it would be significantly cheaper than contacts in the long run.

* 3 years is the standard warranty on my glasses** My wife had to switch from 2-week lenses to dailies because of a corneal infection

Go to hell, hollywood, for making my everyday life even more impractical than it already is.

Erm, it's not Hollywood's fault that current 3D technology requires goggles. If you could name a technology that lets people see 3D movies on the big screen without wearing glasses I'm sure Hollywood would already be all over it; those glasses are not only a nuisance for short-sighted people, you know?

It's also not Hollywood's fault that 3D movies are hugely popular and are bringing the people back into the cinemas. What I see is that once a 3D HDTV becomes a common household product so will the glasses

Great idea! I'm going to pay 500$ per pair of 3D glasses I'll need... one for television, one per movie theater chain (not likely to use the same model, are they?), one per game console, one for the PC...

Unfortunately, depending on what your vision problems are or any other eye issues you have, contacts are not an option. You have to wear glasses. My dad has a vision issue that cannot be corrected by either contacts or surgery so, he's stuck with glasses and 3D movies suck for him.

Also there are issues with people like me who have troubles with the yellow part of the color spectrum that apparently plays hell with (but does not completely disable) modern 3D technology.

Your current vision system consists of a pair of 2D image sensors (a.k.a. your Retinas)... so I don't see why the mere fact that the screen is 2D should be an absolute obstacle to re-creating the parallax that makes your 2D vision into 3D.

The "object" that I am viewing (the flat, 2d, screen) is a fixed distance from my eyes, the parallax for EVERYTHING displayed on the screen, and the focal length for EVERYTHING displayed on that screen is the same.

It's NOT just the parallax. That's just the part that is actually simulated. We ALSO get depth information from the eye's focus. That's why when you close one eye and look around, it doesn't look exactly like looking at a picture of the room.

Note that the parallax is only simulated. The distance between the eyes matters. The 3D camera system just takes a reasonable average separation and calls it good.

Part of the headache is that the parallax says there is a varying depth, but the focus says it's flat.

Exactly. That's why I hate 3d movies, before I get the possible headache.

With 3d movies, since the screen is still flat, only one item can be in focus at any given time. The items in focus are those in the plane where the action is typically taking place, but sometimes something interesting is happening in the background. Attempts to view the background have you focusing on something that will never come into focus. This causes eyestrain and an uncomfortable visual feeling.

Most of the time people want to see what the director wants them to see; however, there were several scenes in Avatar where I wanted to look at the squad tactics in the background. It was quite disconcerting to know that they were permanently rendered out of focus.

If there wasn't part of the screen being rendered with tricks to simulate depth, I doubt I would have been so put off by the other parts of the screen failing to simulate depth in the same way.

No. He is correct. Close one eye and shift your focus from something very close to something distant. Everything out of focus is blurry. In a 3D movie, the focal plane of everything (NOT the parallax, but the actual distance at which the image will be sharp and in focus to your eye) is at the same distance.

There are two different attributes of 3D: Focal distance (how far away it actually is) and parallax (how much it appears to move if you move your head, or perceived by one eye vs. the other).

Your current vision system consists of a pair of 2D image sensors (a.k.a. your Retinas)

It also contains a lens that focuses (if you're under 40) which has an additional 3D effect; your brain knows how far something is away by its focus. In a movie, you're not using your eye's depth for field to discern distance, the camera's lens does.

The retina is a very important part of vision, but the brain is the organ that actually sees, and it doesn't just use data from the retina, it also uses data from the nerves t

The term "3D", in this context, is referring to the simulation of the experience of viewing the scene in the video as being three dimensional from the standpoint of the viewer. It makes perfect sense and this crap argument is just an incompetent attempt at pedantry.

that doesn't have to be the case. that is seen in some scenes where the film makers fell back to old techniques of drawing your attention to what they thought was important. I agree they are jarringly noticable. There are other scenes where the full depth of the field is 3d simulated and your eyes do have to bring the two images together differently for forground vs background elements.

We use a more than binocular vision to see things in 3d. One way is moving our head position, though in a movie theater this isn't really a big deal. Another important way is by focus. This is one reason why 3d movies cause headaches. When they gimmick out to make things "pop out" of the screen, the image our eyes see doesn't match up with how our eye wants to focus on it.

There's nothing really wrong with 3d movies, it could potentially add something. The current state of 3d movies however is to pack the

Close. The primary cause of the headaches is that the parallax angle doesn't match with the optical focus.

Your body is wired to have your eyes focus close up when your eyes are crossed substantially (pointed at something close) and focus far away when they are not. With 3D movies, anything that doesn't appear to be roughly in the same plane as the screen is going to cause headaches because your eyes are converging on something closer or farther away, but focusing at that distance. As long as your primary

Man, that would be awesome. Wouldn't be very practical in a theater, of course.

Then again, theaters aren't very practical to begin with. You're driving halfway across town, paying half again more (per person) than the DVD will cost to buy two years from now, and spending fifteen bucks on a tub of popcorn and a coke, all for the pleasure of sitting there in a chair that looks like some homeless guy peed in it, with a sticky floor, squeezed between two morbidly obese people while their kids sit behind you a

Sometimes the content of the story doesn't have to be good. People often go to expos to see new technology, and not to take it home and play with it. The same thing can be said of some video games and movies. You have your preference, and others have theirs.

How many FPS games are successful based solely on graphical technology, while adding nothing to the genre? Surprisingly, a lot.

I may anger a few people, but I'd say that the movie Jurassic Park had a sub-par plot. Science creates monsters, they run

I'm sorry, I have yet to see a movie in 3D where 3D provided anything additional to my movie experience other than a headache.

I watched Avater, and was distracted from the movie by the places that the 3D effect broke up badly. Of course, I get distracted by the film reel change indicators also.

Why do the movie companies believe that we want 3D? Heck, why do the television manufacturers believe that I'm willing to spend 2 grand more for it? Does anyone here feel that its a useful addition to a movie?/frank

I do. I absolutely can not get enough 3D content. I suffer through Red/Cyan anaglyph just to do my gaming in 3D. I've only seen two movies in 3D, as I'm fairly offended by the price (especially after the article, which I think made Slashdot, about non-sterile glasses, covered in cooties), but I hope to get my hands on a second projector soon, so I can chop up my cootie-encrusted theater glasses and live out my darkest, most polarized fantasies on the nearest reflective surface.

Heck, why do the television manufacturers believe that I'm willing to spend 2 grand more for it?

I agree with the view of this being nonsense. Last I heard, there was all of one 3D-BluRay movie. Really, how many times does someone want to watch Monsters vs. Aliens? I can't even think of anyone I know who watched that movie in the theater in 3D, so I'm not sure why someone would buy a 3D TV to watch it in 3D at home...

And sure, they are promising that more movies will come out in 3D, yet the movies that do so well in 3D in the theater (Avatar, Clash of the Titans especially) are then released only

the movies that do so well in 3D in the theater (Avatar, Clash of the Titans especially) are then released only in 2D on Blu-ray.

It's released in 2D on Blu-ray so that people who want to see the movie at all buy it now. Then, at a later date, (probably when 3D TVs are more common) it'll be re-released in 3D to get as many people as possible to buy both versions of it, where they otherwise would have only bought the 3D version if it were available now.

That is one possible explanation. But on the other hand, why would they expect people to buy 3D TV sets when there are (almost) no 3D movies available to watch in 3D?

On top of that, every 3D set that I have seen advertised so far requires one pair of (expensive) glasses for every person who wants to watch the movie in 3D. And you can buy quite a few Blu-ray titles for less than the cost of another pair of glasses, so I don't think that having more 3D movies available will do much to eat into sales of 2

how about 4k2k video? or the one using displaylink, or lightpath, or both, the one with 10Gbit ethernet, the one with Netflix2 or $COOLVIDEOSTREAMING, or the one that plays back files from UPnP with as much format compatability as mplayer/ffmpeg/vlc, the one with all of the above. So yes there are lots of reasons I would upgrade my bluray player(I currently have a ps3), but 3d with glasses isn't going to be one of them, and I'd still need a new TV to boot.

Apparently enough people think otherwise. You picked Avatar as an example: a movie that has already grossed 750 MILLION [imdb.com] and is set for a re-release later this year [newsinfilm.com] (with a crummy 8 minutes of additional footage - really?), because apparently people haven't seen enough of it yet.

And in the case of Avatar it's definitely not because of an elaborate storyline, character development or any deep philosophical underpinnings - this movie works solely because of the visual effects - without those people would si

Why do the movie companies believe that we want 3D? Heck, why do the television manufacturers believe that I'm willing to spend 2 grand more for it?

because they're young and refuse to learn from history. 3D has come as a fad periodically during my life; I have a 3D movie on VHS (usues the two color cardboard glasses). The 3D at Epcot is impressive, but I agree with you that it doesn't and won't add to the experience.

As to why they think you'll buy it, how else are they going to get you to shell out on a new

Call me back when they fix the depth of field issue. The whole scene needs to be in focus so that when my eyes aren't looking at precisely what the director wants, my eyes don't try to focus on something that can't be focused on.

Then Ebert is really against 3D because of how much darker the picture is, when normal movies are already projected too darkly half the time.

At this point, it still seems to be a gimmick. I remember reading that 3D ticket sales had fallen from 85% (or so) of ticket sales in some of the earlier 3D movies this year to ~40%. Clearly, people are realizing that it's usually a scam for an extra $5 from you.

Cameron worked on it for 10+ years. Nolan explicitly fought against making Inception 3D because he didn't think it would work. There is no way the no-name director of American Pie 7: Bagpipe Retreat is going to do 3D well.

Call me back when they fix the depth of field issue. The whole scene needs to be in focus so that when my eyes aren't looking at precisely what the director wants, my eyes don't try to focus on something that can't be focused on.

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if optical technology is capable of this. Each "eye" of a 3D camera has to focus on something by its very nature. Where this doesn't apply is with CGI. The only movie I've ever seen in 3D was Toy Story 3. While it wasn't worth the extra cost to see the 3D, 3D meant everything was in focus so you could look anywhere on screen and not just where the director wanted you to look.

Call me back when they fix the depth of field issue. The whole scene needs to be in focus so that when my eyes aren't looking at precisely what the director wants, my eyes don't try to focus on something that can't be focused on.

I'm unclear: is this a problem you have specifically with 3D, or with cinema in general? Every imaging system has limited depth of field. What you're asking for is technically impossible except in animated films.

With a standard movie, when your eye can't focus on something it just files it into 'pattern on wall' and ignores it. In 3D, your eyes think they should be able to pick out objects and focus on them (because they can switch parallax to them), but they can't.

In films that don't pretend to be 3D there's no conflict between the parallax and my focal distance, so I never have any reason to attempt to focus at some other depth. In fact, the limited field of focus is often used to show differing distances, to help make up for the lack of real depth information.

Plus it's *not* impossible to capture a re-focusable image -- you just need to capture the entire light field as opposed to the 2D projection of the light field captured by traditional photography. While not i

You can select aperture, focal length, and focus position such that you end up with a distance past which everything is in focus. This is called a hyperfocal distance. It would require some major changes in the way you film, for example close-up shots would be very difficult and the lower aperture values require more light. Or you can just attempt to have either everything within the depth of field, or so far out of the DOF that it is just a total blur without any distinguishing features to draw the view

Call me back when they fix the depth of field issue. The whole scene needs to be in focus so that when my eyes aren't looking at precisely what the director wants, my eyes don't try to focus on something that can't be focused on.

I'm unclear: is this a problem you have specifically with 3D, or with cinema in general? Every imaging system has limited depth of field. What you're asking for is technically impossible except in animated films.

In a regular movie, the whole screen registers with one depth, so an out-of-focus section doesn't have a better (or worse) depth than an in-focus section. In a 3d movie, at least one section of the screen has correct depth and focus, which makes the other sections that have correct depth but wrong focus bewildering.

Imagine if you were walking around and I could decide what was in focus for you. As long as we both were thinking the same thing was interesting, there wouldn't be a problem. The issues come u

I think the 85% may be at least partially due to hype, saturation, and (I suppose to a much smaller degree) technical details.

Avatar was hugely hyped. No other movie since has had so much energy poured into its marketing, particularly focusing on the sweeping majesty of the 3D. I watched in on a crummy screen, in 2D and was so horrified by the film itself that I have no plans to see it... but a kajillion people did. As a science fiction film, it also appealed more to the types of people interested in 3D, a

I'm a big fan of 3D, but I have to agree with you on the depth of field thing. I've gotten used to it, for the most part, but when I started watching 3D films, I had the same problem you did. I suppose that this would be an easy thing to fix for 3D rendered films (Shrek, Toy Story, etc.) but for live action films it will require new cameras with infinite focus.

It IS a gimmick. Note that there is absolutely nothing new about the technology. We've been able to do 3-D since the stereoscope (invented 1838). We've had the ability (and actual existent hardware) to do it with polarized glasses for decades. The old style color based 3-D from the '50s works as well as it ever works on a standard old color television (and so, with a regular DVD player or VHS).

Note the distinct lack of clamor for any of that for decades on end. Note that the 3-D bluray COULD render the 3-D

He's the chief instructor for the Sony 3D Technology Center, so of course he'll tell you its not the tech's fault. Its his job to make sure people don't go against this technology. Its all about PR and the millions/billions of dollars invested and wanted to be made from this. Its like when a cellphone loses signal when you hold it in the wrong way, its not their products fault, it's the users fault because to admit "Hey, we screwed up" will cost much more money then to try to trivialize the problem and hope people will shift blame from the real issue (the tech itself).

I just hope that it dies before it starts to change the way cinematographers shoot movies, because they are under pressure to make the movie '3d-able'. Composing a film for 3d is an entirely different paradigm compared to the decades/centuries of NORMAL filmmaking and cinematography. I bet in future decades, when people watch today's movies without the lame 3D glasses, everyone looks back at pictures from this era and wonder why everything is composed in the center of the frame, with deep-focus effects and limited pans and zooms.

I bet in future decades, when people watch today's movies without the lame 3D glasses, everyone looks back at pictures from this era and wonder why everything is composed in the center of the frame

Part of framing shots with a huge overscan has nothing to do with 3D and everything to do with SDTV. SDTV has a 4:3 display aspect ratio, and cinema is closer to 7:3, so "reformatting to fit this screen" cuts off a horizontal area that adds up to roughly the height of the picture. Even though VHS is dead, cable TV is still around, and secondary TVs in houses are still standard-definition. They could pan-and-scan, but that tends to look artificial for several reasons: jerky starts and stops in the panning mo

Maybe it's not the 3D that gives you a headache, it's the plot (or lack of it).

OK, they ran out of the safe room they had found, and into the scarey laboratory with the evil monster, split up, ripped up/off their clothes (always necessary), and then started randomly pressing every button in sight, and jumping into the first dark room they could find. Why should I be surprised that something bad happens to them? [Noise from banging my head on chair in front of me] Why should I get a headache? [bang! bang!]

OK, they ran out of the safe room they had found, and into the scarey laboratory with the evil monster, split up, ripped up/off their clothes (always necessary), and then started randomly pressing every button in sight, and jumping into the first dark room they could find.

I am intrigued by your plot, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.Sincerely,Uwe Boll

So what they're saying is that it's an inherent failure in the current design of 3D technology - that there is no way to make a movie look good in 3D without explicitly having that in mind all the time. So it's like spam email - the inherent flaws in the current 3D technology mean that there's nothing can be done about filmmakers abusing it, or doing it poorly, or not doing it at all?

That's got me convinced then - I won't ever buy the current generation of 3D. Thanks, "Buzz" and Sony, you made an already-

My first 3D movie experience was The Last Airbender. I don't think it was the 3D that gave me the headache, but the really bad acting and butchered storyline. And also the 3D. It seemed like 99.5% of the movie was 2D, with only a small handful of brief scenes actually being in 3D, which were done poorly. The Legend of the Guardians trailer was much more interesting that the movie we paid to see, both in content and 3D effects.

My first 3d movie was one of the "Ice Age" films. The story was what you would expect; a mind numbing experience unless you're under 12. Leaving the theater my senses were appropriately dulled by the slow action and glacial story line progression, yet I still had a headache.

For those of us who know why I might be watching such a film, I can say that the subsequent multiple watchings in 2d didn't remove the dullness of the action or speed up the glacial story line progression. Fortunately, the post-Ice Ag

I'm no expert on this, but I have a feeling that doubling the framerate might help substantially. The eye strain for me, outside of convergence issues, is the severe motion blur. I think the main issue with this "fix" is that current 3D projector technology can't run at double the framerate...and that's where the "tricks" and the "good 3D" comes into play. The hardware is limited, so they're having to come up with work arounds to make something that looks bad look better.

3D movies exaggerate the 3D effect in order to impress. Actual, accurate 3D would be pretty boring, because anything more than a dozen feet away would be basically little different from a flat projection.

The tech is immature. The specs were only finalized in the last year or so. Consumer equipment is likely to be half baked, non-optimal and very likely to improve in subsequent generations. Why buy a TV now which is likely to be superseded soon enough?

Expensive. 3D TVs command a large and largely unjustifiable premium over a standard 2D TV. 3D is mostly image processing and should have little cost impact on the price of sets. But it does. Give it a few years and 3D will be a standard feature of mid range TV

I was going to write something halfway intelligent about how they need to use mini LCDs over your eyes and track your focal point and run that back through the computer so everyone gets their own frame tailored to their focal point. Or, more cheaply, several possible focal points that are pre-rendered and then stitched together based on your focal point. It would go along way to make it more immersive. I hate the fact that the director

Apparently, the major theatre chain up here in Canada has started adopting the policy of having pre-made bags of popcorn for concession, instead of scooping it for you while you wait, and have the customer put popcorn topping on it themselves at a nearby booth.

While I can agree that this may speed the lines up, it's annoying for people who like the popcorn topping "layered" in the bag.

My wife wrote to the management to compain about this new policy and we were sent two complementary popcorn tickets for

Buzz Hays, from the Sony 3D Technology Center says that the 3D isn't a problem, just the techniques involved in making it?

Sorry, but what that really means is that the visual vocabulary available to filmmakers using pseudo-3D is limited because of the risk of eye-strain.

Why? Because this isn't actually 3D. It's stereoscopic, but the ability to focus at different depths is not available to the viewer. Depth-of-focus and stereo convergence being in sync is something that our brain learns to do at a very yo

What would be the point? The only problem with contacts are putting them in and taking them out, and you're only going to want to wear them when you're watching a movie. Plus, the only two types of 3D they would work with is the old red/green tech and the newer but still damned old polaroids. I'd suggest contacts to correct your vision, 3D glasses for movies, and sunglasses for outside in that big blue room with the fusion lamp.

now that we have gorgeous 400Hz LCD screens with amazing contrast and colors

Looks like someone buys a little too much into those made-up marketing figures about 10 billion:1 contrast ratios or 80 billion colors that they put on LCDs. If anything, the new 240hz and 480hz TVs look worse than the older LCDs. I don't want to watch everything so that it looks like a live-action soap opera, thank you very much.